Wednesday, August 24, 2011

"An ad is clicked, and a purchase is made. Marketers have long used Google Analytics and similar tools to see which marketing efforts drive sales and conversions. Measurement is fundamental to ROI-focused marketing. Now, we’re taking this measurability a few steps further.

When a customer buys or converts on your site, most conversion tracking tools credit the most recent link or ad clicked. In reality though, customers research, compare and make purchase decisions via multiple touch points across multiple channels. So marketers that measure return solely on the last channel that a customer touches before conversion are getting an incomplete picture, and potentially missing out on important opportunities to reach their customers.

Monday, August 22, 2011

"It’s difficult to argue that there hasn’t been widespread uptake of social media for business, from a marketing point of view. Now companies of all size and type are using social media platforms and technologies as a way of reaching new and existing customers. And there’s no doubt that it’s being done well and driving real business benefit. But there is a danger in organisations that see the total benefit of social media as just being for marketing, and don’t look to how it can be used to transform their business from the inside and crucially connect employees. It seems that customers are being given a higher level of consideration of employees, in terms of how they can connect with the business and the information they can exist. How many people can really say that social technologies have been used to open up the information bank within their organisation and provide an easy route to staff members at all levels?

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Google Plus is Google's new social network. But why start a Google Plus account when you already have a Facebook account? Well, Facebook was developed on the premise that everyone is your "friend" which isn't how your social circles work in real life. Google plus is built so that you can intuitively break up all your connections into "circles" and treat each circle separately. (Facebook allows you to do some of the same things but the privacy settings are confusing and constantly changing.)

Google Plus has a lot of slick features, but the biggest reason to open a Google Plus account is that if you use a lot of Google products you will inevitably get one some day.